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| Bantam Books US film tie-in edition, 1979 |
For some time he stood in the garden looking around lazily in the morning sun. Then he disconnected the sprinkler and walked back to his room. He turned on the TV, sat down on the bed, and flicked the channel changer several times. Country houses, skyscrapers, newly built apartment houses, churches shot across the screen. He turned the set off. The image died; only a small blue dot hung in the center of the screen, as if forgotten by the rest of the world to which it belonged; then it too disappeared. The screen filled with grayness; it might have been a slab of stone.
Chance got up and now, on the way to the gate, he remembered to pick up the old key that for years had hung untouched on a board in the corridor next to his room. He walked to the gate and inserted the key; then, pulling the gate open, he crossed the threshold, abandoned the key in the lock, and closed the gate behind him. Now he could never return to the garden.
He was outside the gate. The sunlight dazzled his eyes. The sidewalks carried the passers-by away, the tops of the parked cars shimmered in the heat.
He was surprised: the street, the cars, the buildings, the people, the faint sounds were images already burned into his memory. So far, everything outside the gate resembled what he had seen on TV; if anything, objects and people were bigger, yet slower, simpler and more cumbersome. He had the feeling that he had seen it all.
The Novel: There is something irresistibly appealing about Being There, Jerzy Kosinski's third, very short novel that was published to almost universal acclaim in 1970. The elegantly narrated story of Chance, an orphaned idiot-savant who emerges from the safe home of his guardian — a person he knows only as 'the Old Man' — into a world he comprehends exclusively through the distancing lens of television has the dream-like quality of a fable or fairy tale, offering a vision of what was then the 'modern world' that remains totally unique and disturbingly relevant in our own age of fake news and spurious celebrity.
The story begins with Chance working in the Old Man's garden (a modern version of the Garden of Eden), a task he relishes because, apart from watching television, it's the only activity he has been encouraged and entrusted to pursue unsupervised since childhood. He can neither read nor write nor, we're told, 'understand much of what others were saying to him or around him' — other qualities he shares with the Biblical figure of Adam as depicted in the Old Testament. Chance has never ventured beyond the garden gate into the outside world or had any form of social contact with anyone besides the Old Man (a stand-in for God) and Louise, the Jamaican-born maid who prepares his meals and serves them to him in his room each day.
It is Louise who discovers the Old Man dead in his bed one morning, a discovery that results in her returning to her native Jamaica (where she too promptly dies) and, in time, brings a pair of lawyers snooping round the house. Finding no mention of Chance in his dead employer's business papers, they question him regarding his identity, receiving the forthright reply that he is and always has been the gardener. "No one knows the garden better than I," he calmly informs his baffled visitors. "From the time I was a child, I am the only one who has ever worked here." Unable to produce any documentation to verify his identity, Chance is told that the house will be sealed the following day and that he — a person with no valid claim to any part of the Old Man's estate as far as they can ascertain — must be gone from it by noon.
Chance does as he's told, taking an old-fashioned but almost brand new suitcase from the attic and packing his few meager possessions into it. He then walks through the gate for the first time into the outside world (the ejection from Paradise), not getting too far along the street before the weight of the suitcase and the heat of the day oblige him to stop and rest. As he steps off the sidewalk he is struck by a reversing limousine, its bumper pinning his left leg against the bumper of the vehicle immediately behind it. A fashionably dressed young woman soon emerges from the back seat of the limousine and, after inspecting Chance's damaged leg, offers to take him to her own home where her sick husband — an elderly financier named Benjamin Rand — is being cared for round-the-clock by his personal team of physicians. After the woman introduces herself to him as EE, short for Elizabeth Eve (Eve being the other inhabitant of the Garden of Eden), Chance introduces himself to her as he has seen other men on television do when meeting somebody for the first time. "I am Chance," he explains, "the gardener." EE mishears this as 'Chauncey Gardiner' and this becomes his new name.
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| Bantam Books, c 1972 |
Chance loses consciousness before they reach the Rand home, awakening several hours later to find himself installed in one of its many large comfortable bedrooms. A doctor visits and assures him that his leg is not broken and will be fine after he receives regularly scheduled injections to help control the pain caused by his injury. EE is soon at his side, filled with remorse for what her chauffeur has done to him and, after being informed that he has no wife and family, requesting that he do her the favor of staying with herself and her husband as their guests until he's fully recovered. Chance is happy to accept EE's generous offer and, that night, dines with her and Rand who, he's surprised to learn, is significantly older than his wife and nearly as infirm as the Old Man whose garden he was recently forced to abandon.
Rand pumps his visitor for information about himself, taking Chance's comments about having no pressing business of his own to attend to and seeking a new garden to work in metaphorically rather than literally as they're intended to be taken. Concluding that his guest must be a cagey fellow businessman, Rand asks Chance to meet with his associates at the First American Finance Corporation, perhaps with the view to helping him locate the new 'garden' he claims to be searching for. Chance promises to think the offer over, completely incapable of understanding what his host is actually talking about.
The next day Rand tells Chance that he wants him to meet the US President, who will be visiting him at home before going on to address a meeting of the Financial Institute in the city. This meeting takes place a few hours later, with the President making the same erroneous assumptions about Chance's background and profession that Rand so eagerly leapt to the previous evening. When asked by the President what he thinks about the 'bad season' on Wall Street, Chance replies as any experienced horticulturalist might: "In a garden… growth has its season. There are spring and summer, but there are also fall and winter. And then spring and summer again. As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all will be well." The President is impressed by what he takes to be Chance's refreshingly optimistic statement about the health of the national economy, referencing it in the speech he delivers that afternoon and mentioning the name 'Chauncey Gardiner' to the reporters who attend his post-speech press conference. Suddenly everybody wants to know who the President's mysterious new policy advisor is, prompting the producers of This Evening, a popular TV news program, to invite Chance to appear on that evening's edition of the show as a last-minute replacement for the suddenly (conveniently?) unavailable Vice President.
Chance's first television appearance is a triumph, with his comments about gardening again taken completely out of context by the program's host and its politically divided studio audience. He becomes an instant celebrity, his good looks commented upon by a famous actress and his performance enthusiastically praised by Rand when he returns to the latter's mansion following the broadcast.
But EE, now on her way home after a visit to Denver, still finds herself puzzled by the identity of their new houseguest. Who exactly is Mr Gardiner and where exactly does he hail from? Although she once took the liberty of rummaging through his belongings while he was sleeping, she found 'no documents among them, no checks, no money, no credit cards; she was not able to find even the stray stub of a theater ticket… Presumably, his personal affairs were attended to by a business or a bank which remained at his instant disposal. For he was obviously well to do.' She wonders if he has suffered a serious financial reversal or is on the run from the woman he loves, unable to decide if he should return to her or not. EE herself is physically attracted to him and fantasizes about the two of them making love. (The biblical loss of innocence.) 'The thought of seducing him, of making him lose his composure, excited her. The more withdrawn he was, the more she wanted him to look at her and to acknowledge her desire, to recognize her as a willing mistress.'
Later that evening EE asks Chance to come to her room where, no longer able to control herself, she tries to seduce him. But Chance, who has no idea what sex is and has never experienced an erection, sits there passively while his hostess tearfully confesses that she loves him and wants them to be physically intimate with each other, convincing herself that his disinterest in the idea of making love to her is the product of self-restraint motivated by feelings of loyalty to her dying husband.
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| Grove Press, 1999 |
The next morning Chance is once again the talk of the town, with reporters now referring to him as 'one of the chief architects of the President's policy speech.' EE, who missed his television appearance because she was traveling again, is thrilled by his success and asks him to consider continuing to live with herself and Rand who, she says, "feels so much more secure with you under the same roof." She also arranges for Chance to accompany her to a social event she's expected to attend that evening in her capacity as a member of the United Nations Hospitality Committee, an event at which Chance succeeds in unwittingly convincing the Secretary-General of that organization and various foreign dignitaries of his genius just as he's unintentionally convinced the Rands and everybody else that he's a man in possession of exceptional levels of intelligence and insight. The Russian Ambassador sends a classified report about him to Moscow, while the US President becomes increasingly frustrated by the lack of solid information his aides have been able to dig up about him — someone, he huffily reminds them, he has now quoted publicly on two separate occasions.
EE whisks Chance off to a sumptuous party being held in the townhouse of one of her society friends, where he once again makes a favorable impression on everyone he meets including a publisher who almost immediately offers him a book deal. When he states that he can't write, the publisher is quick to assure him that this makes no difference as he'll be provided with the company's best editor and a full-time research assistant. He's also propositioned by another male guest who asks him if he'd like to sneak off upstairs and 'do it.' Ignorant of what the man has in mind, Chance innocently replies that he likes to watch. Aroused by this statement, his new friend leads Chance to a bedroom where, after some kissing and caressing which provokes absolutely no response from the baffled gardener, he strips naked and proceeds to masturbate. 'The man was certainly ill,' Chance decides. The man reaches for Chance's shoe, pressing his erect penis against the sole of it. 'From under the shoe a white substance coursed forth in short spurts… The man twitched for the last time… He closed his eyes. Chance reclaimed his foot and quietly left.'
Later that same night, Chance has a similar experience with EE when, unable to sleep, she once again visits him in his room where, as usual, she finds him contentedly watching television. This time she makes no effort to restrain herself. She gets into bed with Chance, lasciviously rubbing her naked body against his unresponsive, pyjama-clad one only to be told, as he told the masturbating man at the party, that he likes to watch. EE is initially angered by this, suggesting that it proves he's not attracted to her, but soon concludes that he wants to watch her touch herself rather than engage in the act of intercourse with her. EE finds herself liberated by what she assumes to be his voyeurism, telling him after bringing herself to orgasm that he has made her free and, before dropping off to sleep, asking him to accompany her to yet another social function, this time a ball, to be held in the nation's capital the following evening.
Chance attends the ball in Washington with EE as required, unaware that he now has his own KGB dossier and code name and that, like the Russians, the US Government is still unable to learn anything definite about his background, education or financial status. But this is not necessarily the hurdle it appears to be to those supervising the President's re-election campaign. Chauncey Gardiner, they decide, will make the ideal Vice President. The newcomer is well-liked, well-spoken and, most importantly, comes across on television as being 'one of us.'
Chance, of course, is happily oblivious to all of this. Leaving the noise and glare of the party behind, he steps outside into the cool night air, finding himself in a garden where he's once again able to find the peace he has sought and missed so much since being ejected from the Old Man's house a week earlier. He is where a gardener belongs and, for him, nothing could be more delightful or more emotionally rewarding.
Being There is the gentlest and most accessible of its author's nine published novels, largely due to the detached child-like personality of its protagonist — a man who sets out to deceive no one but ends up deceiving the President of the United States and every other person he encounters merely by being himself and speaking the truth about horticulture, the one subject he possesses a legitimately extensive knowledge of. Chance is, in fact, a blank page — the code name he is given by the KGB — upon which everybody else is free to create their own made-to-order version of him, thereby satisfying their particular requirements and expectations while remaining blissfully ignorant of the truth. His unworldliness makes him seem the opposite of unworldly, while his naïvete makes him seem the opposite of naïve to people trained, thanks to the media, to automatically accept everything they see and hear at face value. He is also that oldest of literary devices — the 'wise fool' whose adventures confirm how gullible human beings are and how willing we are to believe whatever supports our personal agendas, misguided or just plain foolish though these may be. He is, as one reviewer described him, 'a fabulous creature of our age' whose story continues to resonate in a world where celebrity is wrongly equated with qualities like intelligence and talent and a convicted felon and former host of a reality television program was twice elected the leader of the most powerful, well-armed nation on earth despite his unrepentant narcissism, sexism and racism and his widely televised attempt to overthrow its legitimately elected government.
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| JERZY KOSINSKI, c 1960 |
The Writer: Jerzy Kosinski's final novel, published three years before his death on 3 May 1991, was titled The Hermit of 69th Street. Subtitled The Working Papers of Norbert Kosky, it is a lengthy metafictional work concerning Mr Kosky's attempt to write a book while displaying an obsessive concern with verifying his facts. The book is filled with hundreds of detailed footnotes, many of which are fictional or, if not, are often consciously and deliberately inaccurate. Savaged by the critics, the novel subsequently sank without a trace, viewed as a kind of bad literary joke that few readers possessed the interest or the stamina to tackle. But it was clearly a book that Kosinski felt compelled to write, given the controversy that marred the latter half of his career and saw him accused, among other things, of being a liar and a plagiarist. 'Kosky' is Kosinski with the 'sin' removed, a writer determined to defend himself against those who had besmirched his reputation and cast doubt on the authenticity of his work and the validity of his literary legacy. It was yet another strange chapter in what had been an exceedingly strange life.
Kosinski was born Józef Lewinkopf in the Polish city of Lodz on 14 June 1933, the same year that Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. After Poland was invaded by the Nazis on 1 September 1939, his Jewish parents Mieczyslaw and Elzbieta fled south with their sons (there is evidence to suggest that Jurek, as Kosinski was affectionately known by his parents, had a younger brother named Henio or Henryk), changing their surname to Kosinski — a common one in their predominantly Catholic homeland. By early 1942 the refugees were living in a small apartment in a village called Dąbrowa Rzeczycka where they were protected and assisted by various members of the local, non-Jewish community. Kosinski himself received a baptismal certificate from the parish priest and sometimes served as an altar boy in his church, possibly inspiring his lifelong love of disguises and other, more overt forms of deception.
When the war ended the family relocated to the resort town of Jelenia Góra close to the Czech border, where Kosinski took up skiing and resumed his interrupted education before leaving again to serve as a sharpshooter in the Polish army (and possibly pay a brief visit to the Soviet Union). By 1955 he was a graduate of the University of Lodz, having obtained degrees in history and social sciences, and was studying for a PhD in sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw while supporting himself as a teacher's assistant. Eager to emigrate from Communist-controlled Poland to the democratic United States, he allegedly invented a dummy foundation and supplied affidavits from three fictional 'professors' who guaranteed he would return to his homeland if he was granted the right to study overseas. He arrived in New York in 1957 and, after working at a variety of jobs including carpark attendant, truck driver and cinema projectionist, eventually completed his degree at Columbia University.
In 1960 Kosinski, writing under the pen name Joseph Novak to protect his family who were still Polish citizens and therefore subject to reprisals from its Soviet-backed government, published The Future is Ours, Comrade, a collection of anti-Communist essays which some later claimed were suggested by if not actually written on the orders of the CIA. (Others claimed that this was a rumor deliberately spread by the Polish government to discredit Kosinski, who had officially become a defector by failing to return to Poland.) This was followed two years later by No Third Path, a second collection of essays published under the same family protecting pseudonym.
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| JERZY KOSINSKI, c 1979 |
The latter publication brought the young exile to the attention of Mary Hayward Weir, the forty-seven year old widow of a steel magnate who, impressed by his writing, hired him to organize and catalog her library. They were soon married despite an eighteen year difference in their ages, dividing their time between Hayward's Park Avenue duplex and her various vacation homes where Kosinski, an effective and gripping storyteller, dazzled her wealthy, well-connected friends — including Dorothy de Santillana, an editor who worked for the publishing house of Houghton Mifflin — with horrific tales of his childhood as a tramautized mute on the run from the Nazis and gangs of brutal Christian peasants in the freezing Polish countryside. These stories eventually became The Painted Bird, his first work of what he described as 'autofiction' published in 1965, the same year he became a US citizen.
The Painted Bird was immediately hailed as the shocking but poignant testimony of a Holocaust survivor, universally praised by critics for what they assumed to be its stark unflinching truthfulness. The book made its thirty-two year old author an overnight celebrity and probably helped him gain the Guggenheim Fellowship he was awarded in 1967 and the Ford Foundation grant he received the following year, the latter allowing him to enrol at the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University and go on to teach North American prose at Princeton and Yale. He was by now divorced from Mary Weir who would die in 1968, the same year he married marketing consultant Katherina 'Kiki' von Fraunhofer, from what he always claimed was a brain tumour — a lie he transformed into literary 'fact' in his second novel Steps which would again receive high praise from the critics and go on to win that year's National Book Award. His first wife, a depressive alcoholic, actually took her own life, with the brain tumour story concocted by Kosinski to allow him to play the role of the grieving widower — a role he continued to play for the remainder of his life despite the fact that he and Weir had separated and divorced in 1966, a full two years before her death.
Kosinki's third novel Being There, published in 1970, was another bestseller and saw him win that year's American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. Two terms as the President of the US chapter of PEN America, an organization of poets, editors and novelists dedicated to ending censorship and promoting free speech internationally, followed in 1973 and 1974, as did other honors including a B'Rith Shalom Humanitarian Freedom Award and an ACLU First Amendment Award.
Kosinski was by now a very famous man, a frequent visitor to popular New York sex clubs like Plato's Retreat, the Hellfire S&M Parlor and The Vault, somebody whose friends included industrialists and politicians, the Polish-born filmmaker Roman Polanski, the actor Warren Beatty (in whose 1982 film Reds he would portray Russian revolutionary leader Grigori Zinoviev), Tonight Show hosts Johnny Carson and Joan Rivers and former Beatle George Harrison to whom his penultimate novel Pinball would be dedicated in 1982. He was also hounded by English actor Peter Sellers who became obsessed with obtaining the film rights to Being There, only to be consistently rebuffed by Kosinski who felt he lacked the talent required to capture the elusive personality of the mysterious, child-like Chance. Eventually Kosinski relented and co-wrote the screenplay for the 1979 film which earned Sellers an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, with many critics agreeing that it was arguably the best performance of the English star's long but patchy film career.
Trouble was looming for Kosinski, however, in the form of an article published in The Village Voice in June 1982 which accused him of plagiarizing the plot of Being There from a Polish novel of the early 1930s titled The Career of Nicodemus Dzyma written by the prolific, well regarded novelist Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz. Like Chance, the novel's hero is a nobody who stumbles into success and rises to become a powerful politician, eventually ordering that his former boss be executed so his true identity as an ordinary workmen won't be revealed to his new friends and lover who have convinced themselves that he's a genius. The authors of the article further claimed that The Painted Bird had not been written by Kosinski at all but by a publisher and translator named George Reavey who had been paid a fee by Kosinski to do so. Their third accusation, that the experiences described in the novel were entirely the product of Kosinski's imagination and not the authentic experiences of a Holocaust survivor, seriously damaged his literary reputation in North America and abroad, a situation worsened by his unwillingness to categorically confirm that the book was not autobiographical but rather a work of 'autofiction' extrapolated from what he had heard and allegedly witnessed as a child.
The accusations meant the end of Kosinski's credibility as both a writer and a public figure, with people weighing in on both sides of the argument to berate or defend him according to their biases while he, a lifelong hypochondriac, began to speak of himself as a sick old man despite the fact that he was an extremely fit, polo playing forty-nine year old, an expert skiier and award-winning photographer who continued to indulge his passion for voyeurism in New York's hardcore sex clubs. He spent the final years of his life working obsessively to finish The Hermit of 69th Street, writing dozens of drafts of what was by far his longest novel in an effort, some thought, to exonerate himself and repair his damaged reputation.
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| JERZY KOSINSKI, 1988 |
Even his seemingly triumphant return to Poland in 1988 to promote the first Polish edition of The Painted Bird had its downside, with the inhabitants of Dąbrowa Rzeczycka, the village in which he and his family had been sheltered and protected between 1940 and 1945, angrily declaring that his portrayals of them were altogether false, as were his claims that he had been beaten, starved, sexually molested, thrown into a manure pile and rendered mute as the result of the cruel treatment they had collectively subjected him to. As one villager put it when she was interviewed for a 1995 BBC documentary about his past: "If he was alive and turned up here, then for all the nonsense he wrote about… those villagers who looked after him, knowing that they were risking their lives… for that I would personally slaughter him with a knife!"
Kosinski ultimately failed to restore his public reputation, a failure some of his friends believe prompted his decision to take an overdose of barbituates washed down with alcohol and asphyxiate himself in his bathtub by tying a plastic bag over his head. But even in death there were those who did not or could not accept this interpretation of events. Kosinski spent the last evening of his life at a party hosted by his fellow writer Gay Talese, who strenuously denied that his friend had seemed in any way maudlin or depressed (which, of course, does not prove that he was neither of these things given his lifelong, seemingly innate talent for deception). Kosinski had by this time reconnected with his Jewish heritage, founding and presiding over an organization called the Jewish Presence Foundation which set out to raise awareness of Jewish contributions to world culture and encourage Jewish empowerment, something he unpopularly insisted could only become possible by consigning the Holocaust to the past and ceasing to refer to it. He also participated in the creation of the AmerBank, the first western financial institution to be chartered by the new government of post-Communist Poland. He was still wealthy enough to travel and continued to do so frequently with his second wife Kiki in the weeks preceding his death, continuing to enjoy the jet-setting lifestyle he had been living, virtually non-stop, since marrying his first wife in 1962.
What matters, in the end, is not Kosinski's truthfulness but the works of art he left behind in both written and visual form. He may have written none of his books or he may have written or partially written all of them. The point is that somebody wrote them, just as somebody who may or may not have been William Shakespeare wrote the plays we now attribute to England's most iconic playwright. Kosinski created at least two enduring classics of late twentieth century literature in The Painted Bird and Being There, with the latter displaying as many dissimilarities to The Career of Nicodemus Dzyma as it does similarities, particularly in terms of electronic media which was still in its infancy in 1932. Where should the line be drawn between fiction and fabrication? When it comes to untangling the complex life and work of Jerzy Kosinski, it is impossible to tell where reality ends and fiction begins.
Use the links below to read Her Private Devil, a 1999 article about the sex life of JERZY KOSINSKI written by his former lover and fellow sex club devotee LAURIE STEIBER and The Rise and Fall of Jerzy Kosinski, an illuminating 2007 essay by PHILIP ROUTH.
http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/features/1063/
http://www.artsandopinion.com/2007_v6_n6/routh-3.htm
All seven novels by JERZY KOSINSKI remain in print, as does the 1992 nonfiction collection Passing By: Selected Essays 1962–1991 that he was in the process of compiling at the time of his death.
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| Lorimar Productions, 1979 |
The film adaptation of Being There, with a script co-written by JERZY KOSINSKI and ROBERT C JONES (although only KOSINSKI received screen credit for it), was released by Lorimar Productions on 19 December 1979. Directed by HAL ASHBY, the film starred PETER SELLERS as Chance, SHIRLEY MACLAINE as Eve Rand and MELVYN DOUGLAS as her husband Benjamin Rand.
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